This is not justice. This is a national travesty that continues to be played out daily. How many more human beings will be ground under the boot of a system that finds no value in their lives?

And don’t give me any of your excuses! Police were just doing there job! These people should have listened to law enforcement! Rice shouldn’t have had a pellet gun!

Listen to yourself. Lethal force is the only option!? Police have no tasers anymore, no pepper spray? Their guns only fire death strokes? They can’t hit non-vital areas meant to incapacitate but not kill?

What a bunch of cowards we are if we don’t demand police publicly explain themselves when they kill another human being – especially someone who posed them no bodily harm! How morally and spiritually bankrupt a nation we are not to weigh the evidence and decide guilt or innocence! “Freedom and justice for all!?” What a sham! What a lie! What a farce!

I don’t know about you, but I am sick of it. I refuse to put up with it for even one more day.

But what can we do?

No. Really.

When reading about these government sanctioned murders, I feel helpless. I’m just one person. What can I do to stop it?

The problem is that district attorneys work closely with police and depend on them for political support. Sending cases like these to a grand jury gets the DA off the hook so he or she doesn’t offend the officers.

If the decision had to be made in public, voters could hold DAs accountable. With the grand jury system, there are no consequences because we have no concrete evidence about what happened during the proceedings, what arguments were made, by whom and who made what decisions. That’s a poor breeding ground for justice.

Federal law from 1994 already calls for just such a database, yet it has not been funded. This may be due in part to the cost. A pilot study found that it would take a decade and cost $1 billion.

Certainly this is not a quick fix. But don’t we deserve to know this information? And isn’t it suspicious that nothing is being done to compile this data now?

3) Overturn Graham v. Connor

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to seeking justice for those unnecessarily killed by police is a precedent set by the U.S. Supreme Court 25 years ago. Graham v. Connor effectively ruled that police can kill you if they feel you present a “reasonable” threat to their own lives.

The problem is the word “reasonable.” What does that mean? In court, it can be almost anything. It’s a “Get Out of Jail Free” card to police for wanton murder. Justice Sonia Sotomayor calls this a “Shoot first, think later” approach to policing. She says this violates the Fourth Amendment which stipulates what counts as “probable cause” for police actions including arrests. However, Sotomayor is the only sitting justice publicly to take this stance.

This is why without more robust protections for citizens and more realistic expectations for law enforcement, even when cases like these go to court, they rarely result in police convictions.

But courts change. Public opinion can move mountains if given enough time. We need to start putting on the pressure.

12 thoughts on “The Best Way To Honor Tamir Rice is by Reforming Our Broken Justice System”

When it comes to some police killing innocent people, I don’t think it is only black lives that don’t matter.

“MINNEAPOLIS — So far in 2015, U.S. police killed 776 people, 161 of whom were completely unarmed at the time of their death.

“Police killings in America have sparked a national movement for police reform, especially since the death of Mike Brown last year in Ferguson, Missouri.

Based on The Guardian’s statistics, police killed more white people than any other race this year. A total 385 “white people have been killed by police this year, and 66 of them were unarmed at the time of their death.

“HOWEVER, activists like the members of the Black Lives Matter movement argue that police kill blacks at a rate disproportionate to their total percentage of the population — an assertion supported by The Guardian’s statistics. Police killed almost five black people per every million black residents of the U.S., compared with about 2 per million for both white and hispanic victims.”

McGinty’s behavior in trying to delay and hinder the case against Lehmann, as well as his efforts to solicit “expert” testimony in support of the innocence of the target of this investigation, is consistent with the role of a defense attorney in protecting his client during the trial before a jury. McGinty is not functioning as a prosecuting attorney, in my opinion, when he labors to influence this process try to prove the innocence of somebody who hasn’t even been criminally charged yet. McGinty seems to have appointed himself as the defense attorney for the municipality and LE agency that stand to suffer financially, if there is a verdict against the officer and his employer is found negligent.

The trial seems to be the appropriate place for guilt or innocence to be determined, as a result of all of the evidence having been exposed. McGinty is short-circuiting this process and depriving the legal system of the opportunity to do what it should do. This is a good example of why we need independent prosecutors to handle cases like this and avoid the obvious conflict of interest.

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